Author's Note: This is my first entry to the Minor Character Boot Camp Challenge on the Harry Potter Fanfiction Challenges forum. The challenge is to write fifty stories featuring a minor character. The minor character chosen "must have less than 1500 stories written about them." I chose Ariana Dumbledore. The word limit range for the challenge is as "short as 100 words or as long as 100 000 000... or longer."
Prompt: Growth
Word Count: 438
Shadow of Secrets
As the youngest sibling, of Albus Dumbledore, Ariana's life was not easy. His enormous shadow of success had overcome both her and Aberforth, her other brother. She was thankful that she had yet to enter Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Perhaps, she never would, because of the magical trauma she endured not so long ago. Little was expected of her now, but it hurt to know that she would never again be an average student such as her dear brother, Abe. She no longer had the promise of being an overachieving one that had become expected and encouraged of Albus. She had achieved high marks in the home magical curriculum that her mother had taught her until that tragic day.
Their parents had never verbally shared their frustrations that their second son showed little growth in magic or intellect, now she no growth at all. Yet, it was in the way both parents had reacted to Albus; how they had spoken to and about him; and how they had looked at him with such pride and enthusiasm. They had once looked at her in such a way. She missed that look, but she would not trade the friendship that she had grown with Abe for anything even their mother's approval.
After their father had committed those three murders, he was sentenced to Azkaban, a wizarding prison on an island in the North Sea. She missed him dearly as she certainly had been the apple of his eye. However, she desperately tried not to think of why he had killed those muggles. When she thought of the reasoning, she lost control over her magic. Bad things usually happened when she lost control. She and her hypocritical, dubious brother were the reasons.
Guilt, Ariana, had learned was much more powerful than her magic. The trauma, itself, had little to do with what various healers had diagnosed as Uncontrollable Magic Disorder. It had everything to do with the secret she held concerning the day she had been attacked. The day that everything yet nothing had changed.
Ariana often wondered if her mother would still esteem Albus so highly if she knew that it had not been the three local muggles that had attacked her, but her eldest, her Golden son, Albus, which had done so while he practiced spells from an illicit borrowed, hundreds of years old textbook from Durmstrang Institute. His friend, Gellert Grindelwald, had been expelled from Durmstrang Institute for practicing experiments from that very textbook; his grandfather's seventh year text book.
If it had not been for Gellert, Albus would have unintentionally killed her.
At least, she hoped it had been unintentional.